Senior Principal - SRE Principal, Automation & Toil Reduction

Business Introduction GSK remains committed to achieving bold commercial ambitions for the future. By 2031, we aim to deliver £40 billion in annual sales, leveraging our existing strong performance momentum to significantly increase our positive impact on the health of billions of patients globally. Our Ahead Together strategy is centred on early intervention to prevent and alter the course of disease, thereby protecting people and supporting healthcare systems. Our diverse portfolio consists of vaccines, specialty medicines, and general medicines. Through continuous innovation and a dedicated focus on scientific and technical excellence, we strive to develop and launch new, groundbreaking treatments that address critical health challenges. Job Purpose  The SRE Principal, Automation & Toil Reduction leads the engineering of automation that removes repetitive operational work and improves the reliability, resilience and efficiency of GSK platforms. The role acts as a hands-on principal SRE, shaping reusable automation patterns, enabling safe autonomous operations and embedding measurable toil reduction across platform domains. The role sits in Reliability Engineering & Operations and works across platform domains through a hub-and-spoke model. It owns the enterprise approach for identifying, baselining and prioritising toil, and converts high-value candidates into production-grade automation for diagnostics, remediation, recovery, fulfilment and compliance workflows. Platform build direction remains with Principal Engineers and Engineering Directors, major incident command remains with the Major Incident Manager, and the central reliability and automation standard is set by the Reliability Engineering Senior Director. Automation outcomes and priorities are agreed jointly with Platform Managers and Product Owners. Key Responsibilities •        Own and evolve the enterprise SRE automation and toil-reduction strategy, roadmap, reference patterns and engineering standards. •        Establish a consistent toil taxonomy and measurement approach using operational data, service-management evidence, task frequency, effort, risk and business impact. •        Prioritise automation candidates by hours avoided, repeatability, reliability risk, human-error exposure, control value, delivery complexity and reuse potential. •        Design and build secure, reusable automation for provisioning, diagnostics, incident triage, remediation, recovery, capacity, patching, service requests and compliance evidence. •        Create APIs, event-driven integrations, workflows, infrastructure-as-code modules, runbook automation and self-service capabilities rather than isolated scripts. •        Engineer closed-loop and AI-assisted operations with strong telemetry, policy controls, confidence thresholds, auditability and human approval for higher-risk actions. •        Establish production guardrails covering identity, least privilege, secrets, testing, change integration, release, rollback, failure containment and support ownership. •        Instrument automation to measure success, failure, latency, coverage, adoption, exceptions, cost and reliability impact end to end. •        Integrate automation with observability, ITSM, CI/CD, configuration, orchestration and knowledge platforms to reduce hand-offs and context switching. •        Use incident, problem and post-incident evidence to identify recurring failure modes and convert them into permanent engineering fixes or automated prevention. •        Partner with service and platform owners to define SLOs for automation-enabled services and use error-budget and risk evidence to prioritise reliability work. •        Lead technical design reviews for high-impact automation and prevent unsafe, brittle or low